Special Issue "Islam, Immigration, and Identity"

Guest Editor
Dr. Todd Green
Department of Religion, Luther College, 700 College Drive, Decorah, IA 52101, USA
Website: http://www.luther.edu/faculty/greeto02/
E-Mail: greeto02@luther.edu
Phone: +1 563 387 1791

Dear Colleagues,

It has been nearly twenty years since the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington first published his famous essay, “The Clash of Civilizations?” In it, he argued that conflict in the post-Cold War era would be driven largely by irreconcilable cultural and religious differences, particularly in regards to Islam and the West. After the attacks of September 11, his thesis found ready acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic as politicians, foreign policy advisors, and even some high-profile academics utilized it both as an explanation for those events and more broadly as justification for the global “War on Terror.”

The thesis has also been applied to domestic tensions stemming from the growth in recent decades of Muslim minority communities in the West via migration and immigration. The “clash of civilizations” narrative has now become the primary framework within which public discourse concerning the presence of the Muslim “Other” within Western nations takes place. Prominent conflicts from the past few decades, including the Rushdie affair, the Danish cartoon crisis, and the Ground Zero Islamic Center debate, are frequently explained by recourse to this narrative and its underlying assumption that Muslim and Western identities cannot be reconciled.

This special issue invites scholars to problematize this narrative and to explore more deeply the intersection of Islam, immigration, and identity in Europe and North America. Its purpose is to shed light on how the growth and increasing visibility of Muslim minority communities in the West has led both Muslim and non-Muslim populations to reflect on and/or reconsider cultural, religious, and national identities in light of the “Other.”

Dr. Todd H. Green
Guest Editor

Submission

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• Muslim
• Islam
• Islam and immigration
• Islam and the West
• Islam in Europe
• Islam in America
• Islam in Canada
• Islamophobia
• multiculturalism
• clash of civilizations

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Muslims in Sweden: Perceptions and Reactions
Author: Prof. Anne Sofie Roald
Affiliation: Malmö University, Sweden
Abstract:There is a tension between the Swedish ideal of social/cultural ”homogeneity” and the legal claim for social/cultural “diversity” (Mångfald). This tension reflects the tension between UN-declarations, particularly between the Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Convention of Political and Cultural Rights (1966). This article will look into firstly how this tension is manifested in the contemporary Swedish debate on Muslim migrants and their descendants, where the conflict between individual and collective rights is focused upon, and Swedish Muslims’ response to this debate.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Migrants in Chains: Muslim Enslavement and Migration in Early Modern Europe
Author(s): Ariel Salzmann
Affiliation(s): Department of History, Queen’s University, Watson Hall, Room 101, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; E-Mail: as45@queensu.ca
Abstract: Social scientists often assume that Muslim settlement in the West was marked by sharp discontinuities. Yet between the mass deportation of the last indigenous communities of Iberia after 1609 and the large-scale flows from former European colonies in Asia and Africa toward the industrialised North in the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims continued to reside, for brief duration or permanently, in West European cities and ports. Originating from Africa, the Maghreb, the Ottoman Balkans and the Middle East, these men, women, and children were captured at sea or on land. Although a small percentage of Muslim captives were ransomed, most spent the remainder of their lives in domestic servitude or galley slavery by virtue of their religion. This unacknowledged history of Islam in Europe raises important conceptual questions concerning the sociology of religion and migration before the nation-state.